BRI and China's Relations with its Neighbors: An European Perspective: Part 1

                                                                                              

In October 2015, China claimed that another town, dubbed Gyalaphug in Tibetan or Jieluobu in Chinese, had been established in the south of the Tibet Autonomous Region (secretary of the crossing two passes, each over 14,000 feet high, en route to see the new village. There, he ordered the occupants—all Tibetans—to "lay a sound foundation like Kalsang blooms on the borderland of snows" and "raise the glorious five-star warning aloft." TAR (film). The Communist Party TAR, Wu Yingjie, traveled to Tibet in April 2020; the visit was broadcast on local TV stations and featured on the front pages of Tibetan newspapers. It was not announced outside of China: Hundreds of new communities are being built under Tibet, and One looked to be the same as the other.

Gyalaphug, in any case, is one-of-a-kind: It is located in Bhutan. Wu and his retinue of officials, cops, and writers had breached a global border. They were in a 232-square-mile area claimed by China since the mid-1980s but widely recognized as a feature of the Lhuntse region in northern Bhutan. The Chinese officials were in Bhutan to celebrate their unseen success in constructing pilgrims, security forces, and a military structure inside a territory universally and broadly understood to be Bhutanese.

This new accomplishment is vital for a substantial campaign by Chinese President Xi Jinping commencing around 2017 to fortify the Tibetan borderlands, a spectacular acceleration in China's long-running initiatives to outwit India and its neighbors along their Himalayan boundaries. For this circumstance, China does not need to care about the land it is acquiring in Bhutan: the goal is to force the Bhutanese government to yield an area that China requires elsewhere in Bhutan, giving Beijing a tactical advantage in its struggle with New Delhi. Gyalaphug is now one of three new settlements (two previously involved, one under development), 66 miles of new roads, a small hydropower station, two Communist Party authoritative centers, an interchanges base, a disaster relief distribution center, and no less than five military bases or police stations, and what is believed to be a major signs tower, a satellite receiving station, an army facility, and up to six security locations and stations that China has erected in what it claims are areas of Lhodrak in the TAR but are really in the far north of Bhutan.

This involves a method that is more provocative than anything China has hitherto done on its property frontiers. The settling of a whole territory within another country goes much beyond the forward surveillance and accidental road construction that provoked combat with India in 1962, military clashes in 1967 and 1987, and the deaths of 24 Chinese and Indian soldiers in 2020. Furthermore, it openly disregards the terms of China's establishment agreement with Bhutan. It also disregards several years of Bhutanese protests to Beijing over far more minor transgressions elsewhere on the borders. By mirroring its confrontational actions in the South China Sea in the Himalayas, Beijing risks jeopardizing its relations with its neighbors' requirements and interests it has declared 100 percent of the time to regard, endangering its global status.

Bhutan has become completely invisible to the rest of the world. Bhutan should be aware, and several legislators in the district are likely to be aware, that China is active along Bhutan's northern borders but may not have realized the entire extent of that activity or may have chosen to remain silent. Data about the drive, on the other hand, has been going under the radar in authentic Tibetan- and Chinese-language paper reports disseminated in China, on Chinese web-based media, and in Chinese government archives. There is one flaw in these Chinese reports: they never detect that the development activity, as confirmed by satellite imagery, is taking place in a questionable location, let alone in Bhutan.

China has already attempted to incorporate streets into Bhutan, but only in its western parts and with limited success. In 2017, China's attempt to build a road through the Doklam Plateau in southern Bhutan, near the trijunction with India, sparked a 73-day standoff between numerous Chinese and Indian soldiers and had to be abandoned. An Indian news outlet disclosed in November that the Chinese government was working on a town called Pangda in subtropical woods just inside Bhutan's southern border. (China refuted the allegations.) It's possible, though, that Bhutan quietly lost that territory to China without informing the rest of the world, as some analysts have speculated.

Work on Gyalaphug, on the other hand, began five years before Pangda is undoubtedly more advanced in its progression, and encompasses the colonization of a whole region as well as a single town. The Gyalaphug instance has one additional feature, one with significantly more responsiveness: It is located in an area of extreme importance to Bhutan and its people. That location, known colloquially as the Beyul Khenpajong, is one of the most sacred in Bhutan, where Tibetan Buddhist traditions are practiced by the majority of the population. The word beyul means "hidden valley," a name used in traditional Tibetan writing for a group of seven locations high in the Himalayas bordered by mountainsides and, according to mythology, covered by the incredible tantric serpent Padmasambhava in the seventh century and only discoverable by individuals with enhanced otherworldly abilities.

The Beyul Khenpajong valley is the most well-known in Bhutan, having been represented in Bhutanese literature and imagination from at least the fourteenth century. Jigme Namgyal, the father of Bhutan's current emperor, was born on the eastern boundary of the Beyul, just 75 kilometers from point A to point B higher east of Bhutan's modern capital, Thimphu. Given its particular significance for Bhutanese and Tibetan Buddhists in general, no Bhutanese government could ever legally hand over this land to China, any more than Britain would hand over Stonehenge or Italy Venice.

International Strategy contacted the representation for the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, the Bhutanese mission to the United Nations and the state leader's office, as well as the Chinese embassy in Washington and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing. We received no response from the Chinese government, which seldom comments on items before they are published. Following its publication, Chinese state television criticized the story for spreading misinformation but provided no counter-argument to any of the examples, other than stressing the Bhutanese government's lack of engagement.

The Indian government stated that it had no comment. The Bhutanese government did not respond to many queries. Regardless of naked Chinese influence, Bhutan appears to have opted to maintain what Bhutanese political analyst Tenzing Lamsang recently described as a "restrained calm." Bhutan's strategy, he added, is to "avoid superfluously offending any side" as a "small nation imprisoned between two giants." Apart from wandering monks, occasional wanderers, and a small group of Tibetan refugees in the late 1950s, the Beyul has been unoccupied for a very long time.